In our envoronment we have 25 designers running Adobe illustrator and photoshop CS4 and there are often complaints that the programs crash, are slow opening and saving files, and of course the comment of this does not happen on my Mac at home.

All computers have windows 7 64bit, 8gb of ram and CS4 installed and even our best configuration still has problems so I am looking at suggestions on the next step to improve performance and stability.

The computers all connect to file server over 1gb ethernet though more often than not they work from their local hard drive to avoid any slowdown from the network.

Do we change to Apple? Users say they work better and crash less but I have not found any concrete proof of this aside form user opinion and hardware is cheaper for windows.

The file sizes could be part of the problem. My users tend to work on files more the 50MB size range. But I'm surprised that with 8GB of memory and a fast processor that performance isn't better. Have you tried disabling the active scanning on Sophos on one of the machines to see if the antivirus is what is slowing things down? There may also be some settings in the Adobe products to optimize performance that could be adjusted. I know that InDesign has settings like that. I'm not sure if the other products do though.

Could you have any other LOB software that is causing instability on these computers. They really ought to easily be able to handle CS4 with those specs. Also, you may want to check out your file server and network connectivity issues. They sound to me to be more likely candidates for the problems the users are having.

Thanks for the reply. I have re-checked the computers and there isnt any software installed other than the basics win7, Microsoft office 2003, cs4, and sophos antivirus. Also when ever there are problems the users first copy the files to their desktop C drive so would that not rule out the network? Could the problem be when the files are very large? The designers tell me they often work on large 200mb+ files.

The file sizes could be part of the problem. My users tend to work on files more the 50MB size range. But I'm surprised that with 8GB of memory and a fast processor that performance isn't better. Have you tried disabling the active scanning on Sophos on one of the machines to see if the antivirus is what is slowing things down? There may also be some settings in the Adobe products to optimize performance that could be adjusted. I know that InDesign has settings like that. I'm not sure if the other products do though.

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